—- USS Falcon, Dionvia V —-

The Excelsior-II-class ship dropped out of warp, again with their shields up. They had been arriving at colonies after attacks now for two weeks and had not encountered the Klingon ships, nor the pirates. All they had found was devastated colonies. One attack would be bad enough, but Starfleet was being stretched having to assign resources for disaster relief after each attack. Soon a California-class ship would arrive to handle the engineering and medical tasks that the colony now faced with so much of their infrastructure damaged.

Captain Paul Aike paced the bridge, something that he knew made his officers nervous. He couldn’t help it, he was facing repressed rage seeing so many people devastated and losing their homes due to a Klingon negligence in losing two destroyers and Starfleet in losing control of the Changlings so soon after they had almost destroyed the Federation not once but twice.

“We have thirteen colonies now signing onto a petition for open war with the Klingons,” observed Lieutenant Commander Victoria Hume from a console. She was there because Captain Radak, perhaps correctly, found that his presence on the bridge was not welcome and was seen as being in conflict with the ship’s captain.

“It’s not Klingons,” Aike said, knowing that it did not matter to the colonies who this was, only that they were on the receiving end of such destruction.

Victoria Hume nodded, “No but they see Klingon ships in the sky, their worlds destroyed and it’s hard to understand the context of what’s happening or why. Also this is probably the Changelings goal, push for war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire while stealing stuff. Honestly it’s a pretty good plan.”

Aike knew that the Federation was already bending over backwards to maintain the fragile peace with the Klingons. Still that could only hold for so long, and Hume was right with the pirates attacking people in Klingon ships, things were becoming hard to hold together. He was not a diplomat, but he knew that this could not hold, and that the diplomatic corps was doing their best to keep things together.

He focused on the nuts and bolts of his job. Scanning, looking for anomalies and ensuring that the area was clear before they were down to the surface to triage what they could.

Lieutenant William Hume, the younger brother of the Division’s strategic operations officer, spoke up, “Captain we have something off the port side.”

“A ship?” Aike asked.

“Not sure energy, similar to a… Klingon Mat’Ha-class ship decloaking,” Hume said.

After two weeks of chasing the up to now unseen Klingon ships around the quadrant it was almost a relief to come up against one. Then the second decloaked.

The Falcon rocked as both ships, with no preamble or conversation began to fire, photon torpedoes striking the ship’s shields.

“Evasive maneuvers, Aike Four Two Bravo,” Aike said and glanced at Lieutenant Hume at the tactical conn, “Open fire, full spread start with quantum torpedoes.”

The crew was relatively new, but well drilled. They’d been preparing for this since the mission began. They might be out numbered and overpowered but they were going to fight and if Aike had anything to do with it win.